purely consultative and not bind anybody. Now the invitation is to a conference of the first kind, but yesterday's decision is an acceptance of the second. It is, in fact, the acceptance of an invitation which has not been given and a rejection of the one that has.

The Times was right in its analysis of the paradox of invitations: British labor cut the knot by separating itself from Stockholm and its antecedents, and by doing its own inviting to a conference of its own fashioning; and, six months later, the Times was saying that its workmanship was good. Four of those six months were spent in the slow formulation of platform and procedure. Henderson was charged by the Prime Minister with breach of faith as a member of the War Cabinet, and resigned; and announcement was made that the British government would issue no passports to delegates to attend the Stockholm meeting. An interAllied conference called by the British section of the International Socialist Bureau [London, August 21, 1917] brought together sixty-eight delegates representing eight nationalities, but reached no definite agreements with respect either to war aims 1 or to the conditions of an international conference, and apparently got snarled up over the question of minority and majority representations and votes.

Then it was that the British labor movement started in to build up from the bottom. And the first opportunity which offered showed the overwhelming swing of feeling among the rank and file. This was at the Blackpool meeting in early September (1917) of the Trades Union Congress-the inclusive national organization of British trade unions in the economic field. By a vote of 2,849,000 to 91,000, a compromise resolution which was put forward by Robert Smillie and seconded by Will Thorne, threw the Stockholm meeting as such into the junk heap, emphatically protested as a matter of principle against the government's refusal to give passports, declared that a general agreement among the working classes of the Allied nations was "a fundamental condition of a successful international congress" and recommended that the Parliamentary Committee of the congress be empowered to "assist, arrange and take part in such a conference." The chronicle of this action of the Trades Union Congress will be found in Chapter IV.

The executive of the Labour. Party accepted this resolution as a basis for joint action with the Trades Union Congress. A joint committee was created to formulate a memorandum on war aims,2

'The original British Labour Party memorandum on war aims, drawn up for this August, 1917, conference, was the basis of the later memoranda. Appendix I.

and the joint conference of the two bodies held in London in December, 1917, adopted the joint draft. The chronicle of this jointaction will be found in Chapter V.

These characteristics stand out, throughout, in the procedure of the British labor offensive, as distinct from the movements which preceded it: That its proposed international labor and socialist conference was to be consultative and not mandatory; that it was to be a voluntary exchange of views and not an attempt to assume government function, and that it was in no way to interfere with military effort. Further, the procedure provided not for a loose body of labor groups meeting for the first time in the presence of a solid Germanic delegation, but for joint action by a real alliance of Allied labor; it provided for going into the conference with a deliberately formulated program of aims which might be modified as to details, but in which the democratic principles at stake were nailed down, and (as later developed) it provided for subscription to those principles and evidence of readiness to press for them as a prerequisite on the part of any German units which might participate.

All this was at great variance with the earlier conference projects associated with Stockholm and with the Russian Soviet in 1917, which were to have been much more binding but were unorganized. It was, however, as much at variance with the former stand-off position of British labor and with the subsequent standoff position of American labor, as it was with the procedure of the Brest-Litovsk meetings of 1917-18, engineered by the Bolsheviki. These last were marked by the abandonment of military activity and were predicated on the announced belief of the Russian extremists that the German working classes would and could hold their governments up to a course which would safeguard the republic and the revolution. The strength and the weakness of the BrestLitovsk meetings was that, as the London Spectator put it, they were like the pounding of a mailed fist into a feather-bed. Now, the British labor offensive partook of the nature neither of a gauntlet nor of a bed-tick-rather, of a crow-bar.

CHAPTER III

THE SWING TOWARD THE LEFT IN THE BRITISH TRADES UNION CONGRESS

BUT we must look deeper than the form of international meetings, or even the desire of British labor to help keep Russia in the war, to understand the "swing toward the left" in mass sentiment, or the determined moderate leadership which moulded that sentiment into a constructive social leverage. Some characteristic labor debates will help to make this clear, and for this purpose let us turn from the political to the industrial field and follow three annual meetings [Birmingham, 1916; Blackpool, 1917; Derby, 1918] of the British Trades Union Congress (over 4,000,000 members), the greatest and the most insular of the British labor bodies, which before the war had taken little part in foreign affairs. It had been content to let the General Federation of Trade Unions (800,000 members) function as participant in the pre-war international trade union body with headquarters in Berlin, and build up close relations with the American Federation of Labor, also a participant; though the congress itself exchanged fraternal delegates with the American Federation. Meanwhile, not only the British Labour Party, but the Independent Labour Party and other British socialist organizations had long had active affiliations with the International Socialist Bureau with headquarters in Brussels.

BIRMINGHAM: 1916

At the Birmingham meeting of the British Trades Union Congress, in September, 1916, a circular letter was read from Samuel Gompers who addressed "all the national labor movements of the world," inviting them to coöperate in the holding of an international trade union congress, at the same time and place as the meeting of the official peace plenipotentiaries at the close of the It was reported that no program or theory as to what such a congress should do was offered in the circular; the representatives were to be free to use whatever opportunity came to promote the interests of the workers in connection with the terms of settlement. The Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress recommended that British labor should coöperate, but by a vote of

war.

1,486,000 votes to 723,000 the Congress itself struck the resolution out.

This was at the close of England's second year of war. Gompers' circular was in line with action taken by the American Federation of Labor at its San Francisco convention and was dated March 23, 1916, or a year before the United States entered the war. The few arguments on the floor of the British Congress in 1916 in support of Gompers' proposal were not very different from those which Gompers himself was to encounter, two years hence, when, no longer a neutral, and an opponent of any war time meeting with German labor, he attended the British Trades Union Congress at Derby in 1918. C. G. Ammon of the Fawcett Association (6,400 members), who had been a fraternal delegate to the San Francisco convention, appealed to the Birmingham meeting of 1916 not to be misled by prejudice. He was quoted as follows:

The intention of the American Federation was that the proposed international labor congress should be representative of the workers of all the belligerent nations, that the workers who were suffering in every country should be called together at the end of the war to consider ways and means of making such a tragedy impossible in the future. They should remember that when the fighting was over the German working man, like the British working man, would still have his work to do in the world, and would find that he and his dependents were suffering even more than those here. The German workers were no more to blame for the great catastrophe which had come upon the world than the British workers were able to prevent the imposition of Prussian institutions here. (Cheers and some booing.)

But these were lonely voices. Jack Jones of the General Workers (164,000 members) charged the German socialists with "selling" the international labor movement. "Under the plea that they were afraid of invasion," he said:

they decided to invade and on the altar of liberty they sacrificed liberty. As one who came from Ireland he was no defender of imperialism, but he would rather have the devil he knew than the devil he did not know, and he would rather have a slave-driver of his own blood than one of another blood.

To quote other delegates as reported in the London Times:

T. McKerrell (Miners' Federation) asked whether the socialists of Germany who might attend this conference would be the socialists whom the Kaiser sent to Belgium after the massacres to persuade the Belgian people that they ought to welcome German rule, and if

so whether the Belgian workmen who escaped massacre would sit in the same room.

George Roberts, M.P., said the British workers should not sanction any negotiations with the German Social Democrats or their government until the German democracy had purged themselves of Kaiserdom and all for which it stood. Some people thought they were inclined to do it; he did not believe it. The German socialists, like the German people as a whole, believed in militarism as a means of dominating the world. If this proposal were persisted in it would mean, for generations to come, the biggest split in the British labor movement that they had ever dreamed of. The German appreciated nothing but force and brute power, and nothing else would induce him to expiate his crimes.

-Arguments, all of them apparently, which Gompers took to heart so entirely that with the lapse of time, and their positions reversed, he employed no others more vehemently in countering the later British program which embodied his own proposal as one of its chief features.

At Birmingham, also, Will Thorne, M.P., said he would welcome a congress of labor from Allied or neutral countries, but characterized as "absurd" the suggestion to have "delegates from Germany, Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria at a congress that was to advise our plenipotentiaries upon the terms of peace." He believed that 99 per cent of the people of England would oppose any government which attempted to make terms of peace until every German was cleared out of Belgium and France.

BLACKPOOL: 1917

Twelve months later, at Blackpool as indicated in the preceding chapter, we find Thorne seconding Smillie's resolution, which came from the Parliamentary Committee of which both were members, that the Trades Union Congress "assist and take part," not only in an inter-Allied, but an inter-belligerent conference. Thorne said in part:

There are deep-rooted convictions in the minds of many of the members of our unions. Some are taking one side, and some the other, and, therefore, it does appear to me that those responsible for the respective organizations to-day have a tremendous task in front of them to keep the members united during the rest of the war. There are little differences of opinion amongst us to-day; but, so far as my opinions are concerned, when the war is over, I shall be quite prepared, if the other side is willing to meet together again upon the one common platform, to fight the common enemy-and